Dear Sir/Madam,
As a Free Software user and developer, and scientist, I strongly object to
the RAND licencing model. It is vitally important for free and open
reference implementations to exist for a standard. Allowing standards
based on non-free patents would deeply damage free and open-source
software. At the very least, software with the GPL licence (or
equivalents) should be able to target the standard.
Science depends on openness and reproducibility. In the context of the
WWW, RAND would kill this. Companies who wish to make their technology a
standard should allow others to adhere to it without payment.
Yours faithfully,
Jeremy Sanders.
--
Jeremy Sanders <jss@ast.cam.ac.uk> http://www-xray.ast.cam.ac.uk/~jss/
Pembroke College, Cambridge. UK Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. UK